Flirting with a language

I start with phonology; if I’m reading on language X, I read the “Phonology of X” article in wikipedia. Sometimes the article is less than stellar; in this case I find paper articles.

Next, investigate the relationship between phonology and ortography, which is never direct. This is to avoid me memorizing too many fake spelling pronunciations like I did with English.

In fact, in the typical case the phonology-to-ortography mapping will be very complex and many-to-one, so the only way around this problem would be to acquire the spoken language first. But that’s a lot of trouble, and I’d rather read than talk, so I just put in some effort to minimize the errors and hope for the best.

Next, morphology: I like studying paradigms better than reading analytical descriptions, but I read’em too. My main goal here is to be able to map inflected forms back to whatever’s the dictionary form—though tools like Google have been making this technique less necessary.

I don’t care for reading on syntax trees and obscure deep movements. I try to focus on lexical words; a sense for syntax (and function words) arises naturally from exposure.

At this point I’m typically already flirting with another language. I don’t know how to go from here to an actual acquisition plan. If I wanted to move to regular dating (and I plan to propose a couple new languages this year), my next goal would be to reach the “intermediate” point where you can grow your vocabulary from direct reading of compelling input. I think that, for absolute beginners, perhaps it’s not such a terrible idea to build a core vocabulary using artificial, brute-force methods.

Other than wikipedia, I like this for language descriptions; unfortunately it’s only about popular languages, and even then the coverage is uneven.